The problem with Big Tech AI pricing (and why it's worse than you think)
Let me show you something that took me embarrassingly long to notice.
OpenAI charges $20/month for ChatGPT Plus. Anthropic charges $20/month for Claude Pro. Google charges $20/month for Gemini Advanced.
Three companies. Three products. One identical price.
That's not competition. That's price coordination.
The $20/month cartel
When three dominant players in a market all land on the exact same price point simultaneously, there are two explanations:
- They independently calculated the same optimal consumer price through market forces
- They're signaling to each other to maintain a floor
I'll let you decide which is more likely.
But here's the part that actually affects you as a developer: that $20/month price is designed for US consumer purchasing power. It was never designed for the global developer market.
What $20/month actually costs
Let's run the numbers on what $20/month represents as a percentage of average developer income across different markets:
| Country | Avg dev salary/month | ChatGPT cost | % of income |
|---|---|---|---|
| USA | $8,500 | $20 | 0.24% |
| UK | $5,200 | $20 | 0.38% |
| Germany | $4,800 | $20 | 0.42% |
| India | $1,200 | $20 (Rs1,670) | 1.39% |
| Nigeria | $400 | $20 (N32,000) | 5.0% |
| Philippines | $600 | $20 (P1,120) | 3.3% |
| Kenya | $350 | $20 (KSh2,600) | 5.7% |
| Pakistan | $500 | $20 | 4.0% |
| Indonesia | $600 | $20 (Rp320,000) | 3.3% |
| Bangladesh | $450 | $20 | 4.4% |
A Nigerian developer pays the equivalent of 20x more of their income for the same product a US developer pays. Same API. Same model weights. Same token limits.
The technical reality
Here's what actually happens when you call the Claude or GPT API:
Your request → Anthropic's load balancer → GPU cluster → tokenizer → model inference → detokenizer → your response
The marginal cost to serve one more API call from Lagos vs one from San Francisco is essentially zero. Network costs are negligible. The infrastructure is already paid for.
Yet the pricing structure treats every user as if they're paying with US dollars.
The "just use the API" trap
The obvious answer is: use the raw API. Pay per token. Don't subscribe.
This sounds good until you do the math:
- Claude Sonnet: $3 per million input tokens, $15 per million output tokens
- Average developer chat session: ~2,000 tokens per conversation
- 20 conversations/day × 30 days = 600 conversations/month
- 600 conversations × 2,000 tokens = 1.2M tokens/month
- At blended rate: ~$10-15/month just in API costs
- Plus: you're now managing API keys, rate limits, error handling, and billing anxiety
So "just use the API" actually costs more for heavy users and requires significant engineering overhead.
The billing anxiety problem
There's a psychological cost that doesn't show up in the pricing tables: per-token billing anxiety.
When every message costs money, you start editing yourself. You make prompts shorter. You ask fewer follow-up questions. You don't use the AI for exploratory tasks where you're not sure if it'll work.
The metered billing model fundamentally changes how you use the tool. You become economically rational about a cognitive tool — which is exactly backwards from how you want to think.
Flat-rate removes this entirely. $2/month. Send as many messages as you want. Stop editing yourself.
What a fair global price looks like
If $20/month is "fair" for a US developer at 0.24% of income, then fair prices for global developers would be:
- India: Rs165/month (0.24% of Rs68,000 avg salary)
- Nigeria: N3,200/month (0.24% of N1,300,000 avg salary)
- Philippines: P112/month (0.24% of P46,000 avg salary)
- Kenya: KSh260/month (0.24% of KSh108,000 avg salary)
- Indonesia: Rp32,000/month (0.24% of Rp13,000,000 avg salary)
- Brazil: R$10/month (0.24% of R$4,200 avg salary)
- Mexico: MX$35/month (0.24% of MX$14,600 avg salary)
Those numbers look familiar? They're exactly what SimplyLouie charges in local-equivalent pricing.
The actual solution
We built SimplyLouie specifically because this problem bothered us.
- $2/month flat-rate in the US (same 0.24% of income principle)
- Local currency pricing for India, Nigeria, Philippines, Kenya, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, and more
- No per-token anxiety — unlimited messages
- 50% of every subscription goes to animal rescue organizations
- 7-day free trial, no charge until you're sure
The big three will never solve the global pricing problem because they've all agreed on $20/month and they're not going to break that cartel for markets they don't prioritize.
So we did it ourselves.
Discuss: Is the $20/month "AI cartel" real, or am I reading too much into coincidental pricing? And what would fair global AI pricing actually look like?
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